First Friday, March 5
7:30 p.m.
First Parish Church, corner of Congress and Temple streets, Portland
$5
Just in time for Restaurant Week 2010, Portland Playback is offering a scrumptious meal of a different sort: a banquet of stories on the theme of FOOD.
Whether it’s peanut butter and jelly at the kitchen table, or pheasant under glass at the Ritz, dinner at the Henderson’s or chilli at the soup kitchen, food glorious food is an ever-present theme in our lives. Bon appetit!
Every month, Portland Playback Theatre puts five actors at your disposal to reenact stories from your life. Tell your tale to see what happens or just come to watch this unique community experience.
First Parish Church, corner of Congress and Temple Streets, Portland
$5
Ouch! Love hurts! But along with the inevitable agonies, what bliss!
Join us on First Friday in February as Portland Playback Theatre once again honors stories of romantic love, even
though the steam has barely evaporated from our last trist with this theme!
Every month, Portland Playback Theatre puts five actors at your disposal to
replay the stories from your life. Experience the unique satisfaction of
watching your stories performed or just come to watch. As always with
affairs of the heart, you’ll be spellbound!
Playback “regular” and therapist Jennifer Lunden published this great review in the Center for Creative Healing newsletter. She did a wonderful job capturing the performance and we’re deeply honored she thought of us!
Imagine this:
A crowd of about thirty strangers gathers in the rented church vestibule. They sit in chairs lined up in rows, facing a space at the front of the room, where five actors dressed in black sit on black boxes. A facilitator, known in Playback as the “conductor,” stands halfway between the audience and the actors. It is her job to bring the two together.
Tonight’s conductor is Meg. She invites the audience members to shake the hands of the strangers around them and introduce themselves. She says that this month’s topic is “Departures and Arrivals.” To demonstrate, one of the actors stands up and tells the story of the ex-boyfriend who barely looked up from his book to greet her at the airport when she returned from a long trip away. She sits in the “teller’s chair” as her fellow troupe members interpret the scene.
Then Meg asks the audience members to turn to a neighbor and tell an arrival or departure story from their own lives. For a few minutes, the room buzzes with story. Meg asks for a volunteer to take the chair next to her and share her story with everyone.
A young woman sits down and tells the story of the time the police officer came to her house and took her to the Maine Youth Center, where she was incarcerated for a number of months. She describes the hard bed, the bunched up blankets she used for a pillow that first night, the intake nurse who complained of a phantom popcorn smell. She admits she was scared and felt betrayed by this officer she had come to know and respect. “But in the end,” she says, “it was the best thing. I went into a group home, and now I’m an honor student in school. It sounds funny to say this, but ending up at the Maine Youth Center was almost like rolling into a bed of roses.”
The Playback troupe stands up and improvises her story, right down to the roses. The audience laughs and then applauds in appreciation of the story, the actors’ performance, and the courage, strength, and humor of the young woman who has just stood up and shared a piece of her life.
This is Playback Theater, and troupes like this all over the world play back people’s stories, helping audiences to remember their shared humanity. And in Portland, Maine we have our very own troupe, which performs at 7:30PM every First Friday at the First Parish Church on Congress Street. It’s the best five dollars you’ll ever spend.
Curious to see what Portland Playback’s all about? Watch the great Pecha Kucha presentation company member Erin Curren gave recently at Space Gallery in Portland.
The Portland Press Herald published a wonderful profile of Portland Playback just in time for our annual “Holidays from Heaven and Hell” performance in December. We had a great turnout for the night, where audience members shared stories from across the holiday spectrum. From Christmas in Canada to a magical cuckoo clock, they represented the highs and lows of that “most wonderful time of the year.”
Congratulations to the Environmental Health Strategy Center for winning our first annual drawing for local nonprofits! The statewide organization, which fights for safer, nontoxic consumer products, gets a pro-bono performance of Portland Playback Theater Company to use for a fund-raising event. (Stay tuned to portlandplayback.com for the date!)
As part of Portland Playback’s mission of supporting the community, we wanted to show our appreciation to the many local organizations in the area doing good work on tight budgets by donating our services. We had many great groups enter the drawing, and we drew the Environmental Health Strategy Center out of the hat at our December performance. We look forward to holding the drawing again next year. Contact us if you’d like to participate.
Thank you to all the very worthy nonprofits who entered our drawing. We are very grateful for everything you do for our communities.
For more information about the Environmental Health Strategy Center, visit www.preventharm.org.
Greetings Friends of Playback,
Portland Playback Theatre’s theme for October is Weathering the Weather: Wrestling with Mother Nature.
Just about everyone has been at odds with Mother Nature at some point, like that time I drove into a real Stephen King of a snow storm in the mountains of Colorado. Bring your story and our actor/improvisors will play it back! October 2nd, 7:30 PM at the First Parish Church (intersection of Congress and Temple streets.) Still a mere $5 at the door!
FIRST Friday, August 7, 2009, 7:30, $5.00
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church 425 Congress Street Portland, Maine